It has long been desired to provide toy characters producing life-like movements or gestures. U.S. Pat. No. 2,830,402 issued Apr. 15, 1958 to Schleich and U.S. Pat. No. 4,169,336 issued Oct. 2, 1979 to Kuhn disclose two prior attempts utilizing slow movement recovery.
The former teaches that the entire toy should be manufactured of solid material having retarded resiliency, while the latter reference teaches filling an elastic skin with a highly viscous liquid such as corn syrup.
However, both prior approaches result in dense structures so that a life-size or huggable size doll is not sufficiently light to be carried easily, if at all, by a small child. In addition, as a result of their skin texture and firmness, such dolls do not have huggable, soft or cuddly qualities necessary to provide comfort to a small child.
Another approach, a toy known as KRUSHAR (Trademark), shown in FIG. 1, and manufactured by Mattel, California in 1979, comprises an animal monster character or figure having a resilient air tight skin of vinyl and stuffed completely with resiliently compressible, open cell foam. A valve mechanism is mounted in the back of the figure and adjustable between a rapid leak condition in which the toy is intended to be crushed by a child, to a slow leak condition, in which the figure restores itself slowly as a whole to an erect position, in an attempt to provide a degree of animation.
Although the resulting figure is much less dense and can therefore be made in larger sizes, it is still undesirably heavy and, as the entire body must be impervious, cannot be made of a porous, cloth like fabric which is soft to the touch so as to comfort and please a young child. Furthermore, individual limb movement cannot be controlled to provide the slow recovery necessary to produce life-like gestures, only restorative movement of the entire figure is practicable. In addition, it is relatively difficult for a child to completely crush the figure to maximize the restorative movement as the figure must be pushed against the ground or table top requiring an extreme effort by the child.
A known sounding toy DINO-ROARRRRR (Trademark), shown in FIG. 2, manufactured and sold by Fisher Price 1992, has the form of a dinosaur and includes an air bag 6 filled with resilient plastic foam concealed within the body region and which incorporates a slow leak valve directing air across a sounding reed 7 associated with a resonating tube to produce a long period of sound during restoration after squeezing. Although the toy is designed solely for producing a sound by gently squeezing, the air bag extends between the torso and the root of the tail so that a relatively large force applied in the precise direction shown by the arrow deforming the toy to the position shown by broken lines to crush the torso against the tail, will also result in a recovery which, although initially fast, may be relatively slow only in latter stages, when the toy has almost restored to the fully erect position. However, such crushing is not the normal use of the toy and, particularly as the air bag is relatively fat and is deeply inserted into the body completely surrounded by stuffing and isolated from the appendages, it would be physically difficult to fold, (again requiring forcing against the ground or a table top), so that any significant effect could not be achieved on a reliable basis by young children. Furthermore, the action would be unnaturally destructive, even repugnant, for a young child with an affectionate response in mind as perceived as hurting the toy and would be destroying the make-believe.